It's a good time to be interested in avant-garde magazines from the past. Over at Ubuweb we can find all ten issues of Aspen, the multimedia "magazine in a box" that was published from 1965-1971. This archive includes the full text of all the articles, scans of all the objects, Quicktime versions of the films, and MP3s of the phonograph recordings.

Incredible. Contains materials from Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Philip Glass, Robert Smithson, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, John Cage, and dozens of others. At Ebay you'd be paying hundreds of bucks for even a single issue of this mag.

Meanwhile, over at the Eclipse Project, you can download (as PDFs) issues of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the influential poetry journal edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein. Thirteen issues available, published from 1978-1981.

Labels: book_commentary

10:23 AM
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"[Electronic data processing meant] that the collective knowledge bank would no longer be fed through routinized 'office' channels, but through entirely random and unregulated ones. This produced an n-fold multiplication of circulating data and a diminishment of the prestige of the quality of sources. The end result is a newly tolerated indeterminacy with regard to the quality of knowledge[.]"
—Sanford Kwinter & Daniela Fabricus, in Mutations

Elsewhere in Mutations, Kwinter and Fabricus refer to the concept of a "Truth-function," which they define as "the minimal assembly criteria necessary for an artifact to be held as a 'fact'".

Still elsewhere, they reference Herbert Simon, an Carnegie Mellon researcher in the fields of artificial intelligence, industrial management, cognitive psychology, and complex systems. Simon's work replaces the concept of "facts" with the concept of "acceptable functional propositions."

I'm also currently reading Peter Knight's analysis on the rhetoric of conspiracy, Conspiracy Culture, which spends some time exploring the way every "fact" pertaining to the Kennedy assassination has a haze of interpretive possibilities swirling around it.

All of this meditation on what constitutes a "fact" is causing me to reopen my aesthetics of misinformation files...

Labels: information

Tuesday, August 26, 2003
12:07 AM
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I'm currently reading Mutations, a sprawling, white-hot anthology on the contemporary city.

One of the prominent contributors to this book is Rem Koolhaas (and his students involved in the Harvard Design School's Project on the City) and the book, at least on initial glance, seems to be a towering sheaf of disorganized data, similar to Koolhaas' deliriously unassailable S, M, L, XL. There's definitely something appealing about trying to approach an enormously complex topic (be it the metropolis or the creative work and theoretical contexts of an individual) by essentially collating a vast supply of raw documentary material and allowing the reader to sift and select from it as they wish, in accord with their own purposes. (In some ways we can imagine that this is what a non-electronic hypermedia would look like.)

There is no good reason why this strategy need be the exclusive province of hip architecture / urbanism books. Indeed, I've been thinking a lot about what this strategy might mean for fiction, how it fits in to my ideas about information prose, what effects the use of such a strategy might have on narrative. Lots of notes have ensued.

(Note: close inspection will reveal that Mutations does, indeed, have a structure, albeit one flexible enough to accomodate bewildering variety: ten pages of statistics are followed by roughly two hundred pages of essays, which are followed by a series of photographic dossiers, which are followed by several massive hybrid-form projects from various groups and individuals, which are followed by an index of "urban rumors"...)

Linked before but relevant here: the Praystation Harddrive CD-R.

Labels: book_commentary, information, narrative

Monday, August 25, 2003
3:32 PM
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Test cites a Labour Party report that claims "all of the phone calls made in 1984 are now made in less than a single day." (It's unclear whether the report means globally, or specifically in the UK.)

In any case, the effects of this sort of conversational proliferation are beginning to register. Boing Boing links to an LA Times article that indicates that new technologies have accelerated word-of-mouth to the point where crappy movies die faster, which may be responsible for the absence of a dominant summer blockbuster this year.

Instant word of mouth, as a trend, probably traces back to 1998 in Japan with the release of "Ringu," [Rick]Sands [chief operating officer at Miramax] said.

The cerebral horror flick ... caused a sensation in Japan. And in a technology-forward country with lots of cell phones, instant word of mouth became the fuel that lighted that film's box office success. The power of instant feedback—good or bad—was immediately apparent.

"I remember it struck fear into the hearts of our Japanese distributors, because it was a new phenomenon," Sands said. "By the time people walked out of the theaters, they were instant messaging. And it is so much more pronounced now."

In the U.S. these days, the pace of chat is fast enough, in some cases, to affect a movie's box office results from its Friday opening to Saturday night.

Tuesday, August 19, 2003
1:13 PM
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This week, I eagerly devoured the poems in Clark Coolidge's book Space, from 1970. I don't know much about Coolidge aside from this book, but I'm looking forward to learning more.

When I began reading the book, I thought that perhaps one of Coolidge's driving fascination was a love of things—the poems in the early sections of the book are built are characterized by a wild proliferation of nouns:

mica flask moves layout hasty
bunkum geode olive loin candle
mines repeating sky hot dregs, in cast
lank oiler blocks, hats sink
wig pyrite & hasty troll by the rim

(from "The Tab")

At times the juxtapositions of things and their descriptors almost cohere into Surrealist images:

armies of harps & bleeding film, so?
(from "Echo & Mildew")

envelope larva bulk machine, parts of a hill
(from "Dripstone Assembly")

but other times the nouns come so quickly that they confound the image-making part of the brain:

mauve sod gaps ring sinter close to bells slice opals lens rust to spice
(from "The Eight Rains")

The experience of reading these long chains of words is an experience not of sense-making but rather of a quick cascade of mental associations. The ability to make "sense" of the poems is eroded even further by the book's later sections, where the focus shifts from concrete nouns to abstract nouns, pronouns, and articles. Units of syntactical "meaning" grow ever shorter:

Bers phone the the.
Give showed mail ing.
The on won so.
Ly fetch wonders note.
It's a gim, a de.

(from "These")

In the book's final section, the poems rarely maintain "sense" for even the duration of a single word:

tion
inertia
ity

be having
eight

priate
via
iny

flatting

im
dense

in ness

(from an untitled poem)

A number of the poems from Space can be read here, although the sense of progression that I outlined above, which provides a genuine sense of mounting exhiliration, is likely to be lost when reading just a few sample poems. Fortunately, you can download the entire book as a PDF from this site, or see the whole book in scanned form here, courtesy of the I-can't-believe-I-never-noticed-this-before Eclipse Project, a collection of "digital facsimiles of the most significant out-of-print small-press books and journals from the past quarter-century, as well as major new works of experimental writing."

Further reading: Coolidge interview, on improvisational music, naming and other themes that seem to come up on occasion around here.

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

Monday, August 18, 2003
5:13 PM
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Over the past week my friend Angela was visiting. We had a whole lot of fun, doing things like going to see Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind and making chicken / corn / peach burritos. But probably the most fun I had was the day we went to the Field Museum.

I've been to the Field Museum a bunch of times since I moved here to Chicago, but what made this time an especially good time is that we both brought our sketchpads, and as we wandered around we would stop periodically to draw something. Among other things, I drew a flamingo, a chimney swift, and some wooden masks, and Angela made excellent renditions of a giraffe vertebra, a pink fairy armadillo, and an Eskimo wearing primitive snow goggles.

I always enjoy drifiting around in general, but I enjoy the extra focus that comes from looking for things to collect, especially when those "things" are nonmaterial (images, sounds). Some nice memories along these lines include:

• making recordings in Tucson for the collaborative soundscape project
  

• exploring abandoned railroad tracks with Chris and his Minidisc recorder
  

• recording sounds in Lakewood Forest Preserve and taking digital pictures in my neighborhood with Ray
  

The next scheduled drift is going to be down in the industrial ruins of Gary, September 6th, with Chris.

Friday, August 15, 2003
9:16 AM
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From Metaphilm's new essay about the new Matrix:

"The Wachowskis have convinced most consumers that in order to properly understand and interpret their story (to 'get' it, in cult terminology), you first have to do the job of being a good consumer by buying everything that offers clues (but no answers) to the ultimate meaning—thus you must buy the video game to get the rest of the story, you must buy the soundtrack to unlock levels and meanings of the video game, you must listen to the lyrics to 'get' insights into the film’s story, and you must buy the Animatrix series of nine shorts in order to get the back-stories and side-stories, in addition to which you must visit the official WB website in order to really be on top of it all. Many have done all of this, and more."

From my position as a critic of capitalism, I want to criticize what the Wachowskis are doing / have done here—although from my position as a person who's interested in narrative technologies, I have to admit that their ability to orchestrate an intermedia narrative that succeeds on a mass scale is impressive. This way lies the future.

Thursday, August 14, 2003
10:40 AM
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Letterboxing.

"Basically the idea is this, people hide boxes in sneaky places, each box containing a rubber stamp. Clues and riddles are given in order to help letterboxers find the boxes. The challenge is to find as many boxes as you can and prove that you have been there by using the stamp to mark your notebook."

Traditionally, letterboxing has been performed in the Dartmoor wilderness. Now, the London group Space Hijackers are promoting "urban letterboxing," the same thing, only in urban spaces.

I wonder if I could organize a Chicago-area letterboxing game.

Friday, August 08, 2003
2:11 PM
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Since I'm almost broke, I've been spending a lot of time renting 2-for-1 movies at the Blockbuster. This post will contain mild spoilers for two of those films: Adaptation and Pumpkin.

So. Each of those films make interesting use of genre. In particular, each of them, in their closing acts especially, adhere to the conventions of a particular genre (the thriller and the romantic comedy, respectively), even though doing so makes a hash of the narrative setup of the early acts.

Of the two, Adaptation does this more decisively (although I think they both do it quite deliberately). Screenwriting and its relationship to genre are clearly central concerns of Adaptation, and once it begins its descent into genre it makes an overt break away from anything resembling reality. In Pumpkin, on the other hand, this break is not so clean: the filmmakers allow Christina Ricci's character a final doubting glance backwards, which disrupts the artifice of Pumpkin's final moments.

In any case, I'm interested in what genre represents for the makers of these two films. For Charlie Kaufmann, Adaptation's screenwriter, genre seems to function as a kind of tyranny (a point driven home by the film's resident tyrant, scriptwriting expert Robert McKee). Kaufmann seems to be saying that genre erases the human connection that Kaufmann (and Orlean) yearn for in the film's earlier reels, a connection that seems to derive from the "messiness" of other human beings, the pull we feel towards another's fundamental unknowability. The film's ultimate point is that genre erases this messiness and unknowability in favor of an easy digestibility.

In Pumpkin, genre seems to function more as a kind of social coding (perhaps also a form of tyranny). Pumpkin has an intense interest in spaces that are heavily socially patterned (the Greek formal, the double date, the big tennis meet, etc.). The introduction of a mentally retarded individual (Pumpkin himself) into these spaces introduces unpredictability into the pattern, a result of both Pumpkin's unpredictable behavior and the unpredictable reactions of the "normals." But, interestingly, this pattern of disruption is itself disrupted by the filmmakers' refusal to violate the genre codes that determine the film's outcome: the film ends "happily" despite our wish, indeed the social demand to see the romance end in disaster. The ultimate meaning of this gesture is unclear, but it is undeniably provocative.

Some of this summer's action movies have also made me think about genre expectations in a less happy way, in particular Matrix : Reloaded and The Hulk. Both of these films, particularly in their early reels, eschew the standard action movie formula in favor of long sequences of convoluted, dramatically flat setup. Does The Hulk really need four dream sequences before the first time we get to see Banner transform?

To a degree, I'm sympathetic. Both Matrix : Reloaded and The Hulk suffer from an interesting narrative problem, namely: if your main character is (for all intents and purposes) impervious to harm, what do you do to make up for losing the dramatic tension that comes from seeing a character in jeopardy? Even the Superman films have Kryptonite.

Matrix : Reloaded particularly fails to come up with a workable answer to the dramatic tension problem: that's why its action sequences so frequently feel meaningless. The Hulk comes closer by occasionally letting libido drive its narrative: the Hulk may not be facing any perceptible danger when he's fighting Army helicopters, but we in the audience long to see those helicopters get smashed, and the interval between their appearance and their eventual destruction we feel something that functions as a kind of narrative tension. To my mind, these moments, deployed all too infrequently, are the most successful moments in the entire film.

Could a feature-length film be structured entirely around libidinal narrative? Perhaps the Survival Research Labs videos come closest, appealing to nothing more than our desire to see heavy equipment unleash various forms of destruction. I'd rather watch the Pitching Machine launch 2"x4"s at 200 mph than watch Neo effortlessly repulse 100 Agent Smiths any day.

Tuesday, August 05, 2003
2:12 PM
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The Wooster Collective is dedicated to promoting and archiving "street art"—graffiti, stencils, stickers, flyers, etc.

I stumbled across them via a link from Derek Erdman, who was responsible for the prank newspapers placed in Chicago Sun-Times coinboxes a while ago, which featured headlines like "Mayor Daley Child Porn Kill Death Murder."

Monday, August 04, 2003
12:10 PM
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